How to respond to changing light

A leading artist, tutor and member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, Tom Benjamin explains his useful methods for quickly and effectively capturing changing light conditions

1. SELECT YOUR MATERIALSThe colours used in this painting are mostly primaries, apart from the Yellow Ochre. I prefer to make my own greys and browns from these bright colours. It is an approach used by the Impressionists and I find that if I have to mix the more subtle colours myself, it makes me look harder at the true colour of a subject, particularly in the shadows. It is important to know the colours on your palette well, including how strong they appear in mixtures and their relative opacity. I usually use long flat hog brushes, which I find that you can get the greatest range of marks from. I rarely use a palette knife to apply paint with. Instead, I thin with turpentine and, after the first session, I add artists’ painting medium, which enables the paint to flow over previous layers with more fluidity and reduces the risk of cracking. When I work outside I usually take a large umbrella, if it is not too windy. It is important to be able to see clearly what you are working on, so direct, dappled and raking sunlight must be avoided – not to mention the sun shining through the back of the canvas. On a windy day, I tether my easel with guy ropes or push the legs into the soil.

2. UNDERPAINT BRIGHTLYMy underpainting was completed with a mix of Yellow Ochre and Magenta. The paint is diluted with turpentine and applied very thinly. I aim to quickly get the main lines of composition and drawing established at this stage. The colour of the underpainting also serves a role in the painting later on, shining through other colours and still showing in places right across the image. The light in England is often quite cold so the use of a warm colour mix is a useful counterbalance here. It is important to try and do the right amount of underpainting. Too little can result in a lack of structure and muddy colours as you will need to make alterations at a late stage when the paint is thicker; too much risks killing off the life of the image and reduces later stages to simply colouring in. Always try to underpaint with a thin mix that contains no white – it will dry quickly and be easier to overpaint.

3. ESTABLISH CONNECTIONSWith a warm mix of Yellow Ochre, Titanium White, Cadmium Red and a little Ultramarine, I made a series of marks in the sky near the horizon and used the same colour mix for the warm browns of the woods. At this stage, I was aiming to establish simple connections between the colours and tones rather than closely observe and attempt to copy a particular area. I then mixed a few of the greens I could see in the sky and painted those in thinly as well. For most of the progression of a painting, I aim to make a colour from one I have just used. This means that I avoid focusing on copying each colour individually and instead concentrate on what the relationships are between different colours.

4. DEVELOP FORMHaving laid down some warm colours, I needed to balance these with some of the cooler tones in the subject. I washed a blue mix over the warm horizon colour (allowing some of the warmth to show through) and also used the purplish blue from the sky (based on Ultramarine) to stand for the shadows on the frost. Note here how the brushmarks have an open structure with spaces between them; this helps to establish the form in the image, as seen in the foreground where the direction of the marks has started to indicate the plains of the land receding from us.

5. CONSIDER THE COLOURSWith the sun at a low angle, the contrasts of warm and cold colours were accentuated. The grasses on the ground were warm in places where the sun shone through them and cold where it reflected off them. I build up paintings colour by colour, rather than object by object, so that whenever I have a colour on my brush, I look for places to put it. I also find it useful to think of a subject in terms of four main kinds of light: deep shadows, shadows, mid tones, and highlights. The mid-tones are those places where the direct sunlight is falling and in this painting this was where I have concentrated my brushwork at first.

6. DEFINE THE SHADOWSAt every stage of a painting, the next thing to work on is determined by what the painting itself most urgently requires. Here more darks were added to build up structure in both the foreground and the woods. The darks consisted of main shadows and deep shadows. The main light source (the sunlight) wasn’t falling directly on to the main shadow areas but a secondary light was reflecting on to them. This is why the main shadows in frost or snow appear so blue – they are reflecting blue light from the sky. The deep shadows are those places where there is little or no secondary light. Warm colours in deep shadows can increase the impression of intensely bright light in the painting.

7. LOOK FOR COLOUR BIASFurther structure was added at this stage. When sufficient middle and dark tones have been laid down in a painting, it becomes possible to judge the relationship between the lights in the sky and the sunlit frost. Pure white is best avoided as it does not exist in nature and leaves a painter with nowhere else to go. It is best to think of the light colours in the painting as pale greys. Ask yourself what is the colour bias of the grey: is it closer to yellow, pink, purple or blue? If you are not sure, try to compare it to two or three other colours in your view.

8. ENCOURAGE OPTICAL MIXESDeveloping the painting through broken touches of different colours encourages the viewer to optically mix the colours in the finished painting. This might be because different hues that are similar in tone sit next to one another or it could also occur in a streaky brush mark, when one colour is dragged over another. Even though the underpainting was used to explore the shapes of the landscape, you can see from this detail that the brushmarks helped to suggest the form, rather than just filling them in. This means ‘drawing’ (or the exploring and understanding of shape and form) occured as part of the process of developing the colour relationships in the painting, rather than as a separate concern.

9. FINISHING TOUCHESIn the final painting, thick and thin paint will sit next to one another. The dark tones were often applied with thinner, more translucent colour to give shadows depth, while I often applied the paint more heavily to the lighter toned areas. Remember that adding white to a colour cools it down and if that is not what you want, you may need to add some yellow as well. One of the wonderful qualities of oil paint is that a stroke of it can retain its own texture and character, while at the same time combining with other strokes to suggest a tree or a patch of light on the snow. You can further explore the limits of oil paint by alternately applying it in thick, liquid strokes and dry, dragged marks. Try to hold the brush as lightly as possible – then you will fi nd you can lay one colour over another without the two colours merging. I find that it is only when I am working directly in front of a subject that I have an intuitive sense of what texture I want the brushmark to have. It is then that the sense of sight and the sense of touch become closer.

The Author

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